A novel three-stage fuzzy GIS-MCDA approach to the dry port site selection problem: A case study of Shahid Rajaei Port in Iran

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2022.108112Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Seaport congestion leads to increase in shipping cost, accidents and air pollution.

  • Dry ports are used in tandem with coastal ports to alleviate this congestion.

  • This study proposes a novel three-stage approach for dry port site selection.

  • MCDA-GIS is used long with fuzzy SWARA MULTIMOORA technique.

  • Proposed framework is more robust than existing model in the literature.

Abstract

Seaport congestion not only leads to an increase in shipping freight cost, but also results in an increase in traffic, accident rates, stress and environmental pollution of coastal cities. To alleviate these challenges, dry ports, terminals located in the hinterland of coastal ports, are being used in tandem with seaport operations. The necessary transportation infrastructure such as roads, railways, and airports are provided near these ports, and customers can send and receive their goods using these facilities. The site selection of dry ports is a strategic decision associated with the high cost of building a facility. This paper is the first to propose a three-stage approach in which an integrated MCDA-GIS (Multi-Criteria Decision-Making based Geographic Information System) methodology consisting of fuzzy SWARA (Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis) GIS-based site selection with fuzzy functions, and an augmented version of fuzzy MULTIMOORA (Multi-Objective Optimization on the basis of Ratio Analysis plus full multiplicative form), is used to weigh the decision-making criteria, identify potential sites, evaluate those alternatives, respectively. A case study is considered for selecting dry ports in the Shahid Rajaee port of Iran, located in the center of the south-north transport corridor in a region that is responsible for almost 50% of Iran’s trade volume. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with the most common fuzzy AHP method in the literature. It is observed that the developed method performs less complex and more robust than the prior technique.

Introduction

Seaports typically face several challenges, such as a lack of access to shipments’ destinations and heavy traffic due to the lack of space for loading, unloading, and storage (Roso & Lumsden, 2010). As a result, the inland transportation for marine freights comprises more than 60% of the total shipping costs (Khaslavskaya & Roso, 2019). To resolve these issues, dry ports, terminals located in the hinterland of coastal ports, are being used in tandem with seaport operations (Roso, Woxenius, & Lumsden, 2009). More specifically, a dry port is a terminal located near the sea on the mainland and connects an industrial or commercial area to one or more seaports by rail and road. It usually receives and sends cargo in containers.

Dry ports are often connected to seaports by railroads and are equipped with handling, loading/unloading, and cleaning machinery for containers. Containers are carried from seaports to dry ports by train to leverage economies of scale and decrease the inbound logistics costs, decrease emissions, receive services in a more spacious place where land acquisition cost is much lower than coastal areas. In dry ports, containers are opened, and their contents get repacked to be sent to the destination through the road transportation mode, as portrayed in Fig. 1.

Truck-based inland transportation of maritime shipments leads to substantial emissions, and intermodal rail transport facilitated by dry ports could reduce this emission significantly. According to a recent simulation-based model, dry ports can decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 5.79% compared to pure road transportation (Kurtulus & Cetin, 2019). A study in northern Europe shows that dry ports have reduced CO2 emission by over 12,000 tons each year and have created hundreds of new jobs (Khaslavskaya & Roso, 2019). Another research conducted in Italy concluded that dry ports decrease pollutants by 17%, while preventing about 8000 tons of CO2 emission per year (Carboni & Orsini, 2020). Besides the social and environmental benefits, dry ports have technical and economic benefits, as well. They can keep the global economic position of countries by developing efficient logistics industries, generate other economic activities in the area, provide more efficient access to the related services, and facilitate better land use possibilities. Expansion of dry ports can also reduce congestion on road network, number of car accidents, cost of road maintenance, and increase asset utilization (United Nations ESCAP, 2015).

As mentioned, one of the most important goals of dry ports is to enhance the logistics network operation. In order to fulfill this goal, dry ports must be built in suitable sites determined by a comprehensive site selection process. The site selection problem is a multi-criteria and multi-dimensional problem involving attributes, such as cost, time, capacities, infrastructures, labor access, and other geographical, social, and environmental factors. In Iran, dry port and intermodal transportation expansion have become a top priority in recent years. One of the most important seaports of the country that needs to be supported by dry ports is the Shahid Rajaee port in the south of Iran. Excellent geographical location, access to the world’s open waters through the Persian Gulf, connection to the international railway network and the Silk Road, modern equipment and facilities, proximity to the Kish and Qeshm free trade zones and the ports of the Persian Gulf, make this port a strategic and unique base (Miremadi, Cheraghi, Khaligh, & Naderi, 2012).

To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to propose a three-stage approach in which an integrated MCDA-GIS methodology consisting of fuzzy SWARA along with an augmented version of fuzzy MULTIMOORA has been used to weigh the decision-making criteria, identify potential sites, and evaluate those alternatives. Moreover, Fuzzy SWARA and Fuzzy MULTIMOORA are among the newest and most robust MCDA methods that have been employed to determine the weights of the suitability factors and rank the alternatives, respectively. The main advantages of using the integrated fuzzy SWARA-fuzzy GIS-fuzzy MULTIMOORA over other similar approaches are its ability to classify and prioritize a wide range of spatial, social, economic, environmental, and political considerations that can affect site selection of national projects like dry ports. We compare the proposed approach with the existing method in the literature and prove that the former technique is more robust and computationally less complex than prior work.

This research is one of the first to leverage the GIS for dry port site selection. GIS has been approved to be an effective tool for site selection problems across various sectors, such as factories and industrial zones, irrigation systems, power plants and airports (Deveci et al., 2018, Erkan and Elsharida, 2020, Merrouni et al., 2018, Neissi et al., 2020). We deviate from the existing literature by using a fuzzy membership function in our GIS weighting system, instead of a crisp weighting system which has been employed in most of the previous works on GIS-based site selection. Moreover, instead of traditional MCDM methods that can give non-robust answers, a robust method with three preference functions has been employed in this study to deliver a reliable answer. Unlike similar works that use two-stage methods, our proposed method consists of 4 steps, including factor identification, factor prioritization, fuzzy GIS analysis for identifying candidate sites, and the final site selection using MULTIMOORA. The existing methods just determine the weights of the decision-making criteria and apply the weights to the GIS. However, we also consider some factors that are not convertible to GIS raster maps and have a different nature. Therefore, they must be considered in a separate stage. So, we choose some candidate sites based on geospatial factors, and then we evaluate those candidates based on other non-geospatial factors.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. A literature review on dry port site selection problems in different countries is presented in Section 2. The research methodology describing fuzzy SWARA, GIS-based site selection with fuzzy functions, and an augmented version of fuzzy MULTIMOORA is described in Section 3. In Section 4, the results of the proposed methodology on the case study of Shahid Rajaee port have been detailed. Finally, conclusions and suggestions for future research are highlighted in Section 5.

Section snippets

GIS-MCDA approach to site selection

In the past, the site selection problem was assumed to be influenced only by financial and technical factors. However, today, the importance of social, environmental and political requirements in the location selection of national projects like dry ports is undeniable (Abbasi & Pishvaee, 2018). Therefore, site selection models must be comprehensive to accommodate all effective criteria in the entire supply chain. The site selection problem is a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) problem in

Methodology

As indicated earlier, the goal of this research is to select a preferred location to construct a dry port based upon a comprehensive set of criteria. We use the MCDM technique in this study for the following reasons. Some of these factors considered in this study can only be measured and improved using subjective data, while objective data exists for the other factors. For example, transportation cost or CO2 emission can easily be measured, but political, geo-spatial, or strategic

Reference point method

The fuzzy reference method (RP) was developed based on the fuzzy ratio approach. In this method, the reference point is calculated using the normalized decision matrix obtained in the fuzzy ratio system method. If a criterion is positive, the maximum value of each fuzzy component for different alternatives is considered (according to Eq (20)) as a reference point, and if the criterion is negative, the minimums are used instead of the maximums. The fuzzy reference point is shown with (r).Xj+=(

Case study

As indicated earlier, the developed methodology has been tested on the Shahid Rajaee Port in Iran. After implementing our methodology in this case study, we compare our results with those obtained using fuzzy AHP.

Conclusions

There are several obstacles associated with the efficient movement of goods at seaport leading to an increase in coastal port congestion, shipping freight cost, traffic, accident rates, stress and CO2 emission in coastal cities. Dry ports, terminals located near the sea on the mainland connecting industrial areas to seaports, are being widely leveraged to moderate the above-specified issues. Dry port site selection is a crucial problem due to the high cost associated with building the

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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